Last week, Okkervil River digitally debuted its Golden Opportunities Mixtape, a marvelous live, nine-song cover collection – with the noted exception of “Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas” – that serves as musical annotations to this year’s The Stage Names.
It ranges from intriguing renditions of Joni Mitchell’s “The Blonde in the Bleachers” and Randy Newman’s “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear” to “April Anne” by John Phillips and lead singer and songwriter Will Sheff’s personal translation of Serge Gainsbourg’s “I Came Here to Say I’m Going Away.”
Sheff recently spoke to Off the Record about the way music and literature influence his character sketches narratives and his interest in the feminine voice.
Off the Record: The Golden Opportunities Mixtape serves almost as cryptic annotations to The Stage Names. How would you describe the way Joni Mitchell’s “The Blonde in the Bleachers” influences the development of a song like “You Can’t Hold the Hand of a Rock & Roll Man?”
Will Sheff: That song, in particular, was important for me to get right. I kinda stole … I think of Joni Mitchell as an essential feminine voice, in so much as you can say there’s an essential feminine voice. When I first heard that song what I really liked about it is that she’s really getting in the head of this macho rock musician. I ended up taking lines from it in two different songs on the record. For Golden Opportunity, I had a few songs that I had been kicking around for some time and some that I knew I wanted to do specifically to reference all of these things I tried to do discreetly before. That was the last song I did, but I thought it should be there because it was so influential on those songs. In particular, I thought it was pretty cute to undercut that song with the title “You Can’t Hold the Hand of a Rock & Roll Man,” which is kind of a macho, swaggering, cocky rock song.
OTR: In general, you seem to be interested in the female voice. Your cover of Jimmy Webb’s “Do What You Gotta Do,” for example, is patterned after Nina Simone’s version.
WS: I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of authorship and identity, and I think musically and vocally I wish I was born a girl. I wish I could sing with a female voice. The way I write and sing is kind of character-based, trying to put myself in a different frame of mind than my own. Even in these love songs written by women, I’m trying to retain their point of view, which is not to say I was singing in a high voice. It’s an idea I got from the New York Dolls. There’s something about the way they covered and re-contextualized the Shangri-Las on songs like “Looking for a Kiss.” Somehow these tough New York guys like David Johansen and these tough New York girls sounded the exact same to me. It was an entertaining thing for me to try to do.
OTR: How would you compare the way the poet John Berryman was developed with the narratives of The Stage Names and the way Tim Hardin’s music worked into Black Sheep Boy?
WS: Those worked quite differently, actually. I thought of Tim Hardin’s “Black Sheep Boy” much more on its surface level, the image that song gave me of this creature, and not the person behind the song. With John Berryman, that came about in a very heartfelt and straight-forward way. I love his writing, and on this last road trip I stopped off and stood on the bridge he jumped off and was thinking about that when it sort of manifested in that song. I did think about his writing style and tried to add a touch of that into the song as well.
OTR: Do music and literature influence your creative process in same way?
WS: Honestly, I’m much more influenced by music. I like to read books and watch movies like anybody else, but when it comes down to it my ass is in a chair with a guitar trying to write a rock song. I’m not really trying to write the next great novel in a verse-chorus-verse three-minute song. Maybe along the way some other stuff goes in there as garnish that sets it off and makes it more interesting, but, ultimately, I don’t think you need to know or appreciate anything about writing or the references I might make in order to enjoy the song. If that’s the case, then I failed a bit.
OTR: I was surprised how much Serge Gainsbourg’s “I Came Here to Say I’m Going Away” sounded like an Okkervil River song in terms of the narrative voice and the delivery. Was that similarity due to the way you translated it or was that already in place?
WS: That was an interesting process because I did a translation that was pretty simple. I was singing it with the band and I noticed it didn’t have the feel of the Serge Gainsbourg song. I realized the way he sings that particular song, there’s almost too many syllables for each line. It’s almost like machine gun speech. I realized I needed the line to be a bit more awkward to approximate that feeling, which might have made it sound a bit more like my natural writing voice, but I really just wanted it to sound like a place that was credible to me. I didn’t know at the time, but there’s a Jarvis Cocker song I assume he did the translation for, and I felt gratified because we translated some of the lines the same. This great mind I respect came up with the same solution to a problem as me.
OTR: The mixtape gives the impression you’re regularly learning other people’s songs or performing covers. Is that the case, or was this a very purposeful endeavor?
WS: I’ve always enjoyed playing covers. I think there’s something very noble about a cover band. I’ve had so many great experiences where I’m in some small bar in a small town and there’s this cover band doing classic soft rock and everyone in the room is having a great time. There’s this unpretentious sense that it’s not about the band, but the audience, the emotion this music has. At the same time, if you’re not a cover band, people usually want to hear your own music. I guess this was an outlet for that side of me. I was also listening to a lot of Nina Simone and having my mind blown with the way she was completely remodeling all of these songs.
OTR: Is there anything on the horizon for Okkervil River?
WS: We’re going to be coming down to Austin to do an appendix to The Stage Names within the next couple of months.
OTR: What is it about appendices that appeal to you so much?
WS: It’s the perfect solution for a problem I keep having, which is I write a lot of songs for a record and I keep being charmed by the ones I left off. It’s a good way to get something out of your system too. Some of the songs have the same themes and are really coming from that same place and would sound a bit out of place if they were removed from that context.
This article appears in December 14 • 2007.